Western Digital on Thursday refreshed lineup of 3.5" RAID Edition hard disk drives with new capacities as well as unique five-platter technology, thus significantly increasing storage density for multi-drive solutions. The new hard drives provide capacities up to 4TB and come with either Serial ATA or Serial Attached SCSI interfaces.

The new breed of Western Digital RAID Edition (RE) hard disk drives are based on 800MB platters and can be equipped by up to five of such platters to provide up to 4TB capacity points for high-density RAID storage solutions. The drives have 7200rpm rotational speed, 32MB cache, 170MB/s - 182MB/s host to drive speed and up to 6Gb/s interface speed. WD RE SAS and WD RE SATA hard disk drives feature NoTouch ramp load technology (recording heads never touch the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to recording heads and media as well as better drive protection in transit) as well as Dual Stage Actuation (DSA) and Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF) technologies. The hard drives consume from 6.9W (idle) to 11.2W (sequential read).

“Given the insatiable need for storage capacity across all market segments, WD is offering both SAS and SATA interfaces for the WD 4 TB RE hard drives to best support both private and public clouds. WD continues to pioneer the capacity-optimized 3.5" market segment, in particular, and the WD RE SAS and SATA 4 TB drives are designed, tested and optimized for enterprise storage and applications, enabling 33% greater capacity than previously available drives and up to 2.4 PB of raw capacity in a single enterprise rack,” said Doug Pickford, senior director of business marketing for WD’s enterprise business unit.

The new WD RE 4TB hard drives are perfect for maximum capacity enterprise storage solutions, such as scale out, cloud storage, RAID arrays, and NAS; a massive 2.4PB of available storage (with 10 4U, 60 bay enclosures).

“With the new 4 TB 7200rpm hard disk drives from WD, the Dell PowerVault MD3 Array series will offer customers more storage capacity than ever before. The new 4 TB HDDs on our recently announced MD3 Dense arrays will allow our customers to store even more data in a compact form factor, with up to 240 TB of data storage in a single dense array and up to a maximum of 720 TB utilizing a single MD3 Dense array and two 60 disk MD3 expansion enclosures,” said Brett Roscoe, general manager and executive director, PowerVault and data management solutions at Dell Storage.

WD RE SAS and WD RE SATA hard drives are covered by a five-year limited warranty and are available through select distributors and resellers. Prices are as follows:

Tags: WD, Western Digital, RAID Edition, SAS, SATA, Serial ATA